BiblioVault - Books about Vietnam -

Adventures in Chaos

American Intervention for Reform in the Third World

Douglas Macdonald

Harvard University Press, 1992

Can—or should—the United States try to promote reform in client states in the Third World? This question, which reverberates through American foreign policy, is at the heart of Adventures in Chaos. A faltering friendly state, in danger of falling to hostile forces, presents the U.S. with three options: withdraw, bolster the existing government, or try to reform it. Douglas Macdonald defines the circumstances that call these policy options into play, combining an analysis of domestic politics in the U. S., cognitive theories of decision making, and theories of power relations drawn from sociology, economics, and political science.

He examines the conditions that promote the reformist option and then explores strategies for improving the success of reformist intervention in the future. In order to identify problems in this policy—and to propose solutions—Macdonald focuses on three case studies of reformist intervention in Asia: China, 1946-1948; the Philippines, 1950-1953; and Vietnam, 1961-1963. Striking similarities in these cases suggest that such policy dilemmas are a function of the global role played by the U.S., especially during the Cold War. Though this role is changing, Macdonald foresees future applications for the lessons his study offers.

A challenge to the conventional wisdom on reformist intervention, Adventures in Chaos—through extensive archival research—displays a theoretical and historical depth often lacking in treatments of the subject.

[more]

The American Dream in Vietnamese

Nhi T. Lieu

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

In her research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, Nhi T. Lieu explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. In The American Dream in Vietnamese, she claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry.

Lieu examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and Web sites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. She shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity.

The American Dream in Vietnamese demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants’ paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, Lieu finds the dramatization of the community’s struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.

[more]

America's Miracle Man in Vietnam

Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia

Seth Jacobs

Duke University Press, 2004

America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of “Oriental” passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support.

A diplomatic and cultural history, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U.S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem’s dictatorship as necessary in “the Orient.” By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”

[more]