“Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the
Making of America’s Vietnam” by Fredrik Logevall
By Gordon Goldstein,
Gordon Goldstein
Sep 28, 2012 09:40 PM EDT
The Washington Post
Why do the most thoughtful national security strategists and policymakers perpetually grapple with the lessons of history? Because there are few truly original problems in world politics that have not been confronted before, as scholar Fredrik Logevall’s superb new work reminds us. Over the centuries, strategic overextension by great powers acting on the periphery of their national interests has hobbled ancient empires and modern states alike, in past decades consuming both France and the United States in a dual narrative of disaster in Southeast Asia. This is the subject of Logevall’s voluminous, penetrating and cautionary new study, “Embers of War.”
Logevall, the John S. Knight professor of international studies at Cornell University, is a specialist in U.S. foreign relations and the author of, among other works, “Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam,” a seminal exercise in historical scholarship that persuasively refutes the thesis that the massive intervention engineered by President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers beginning in 1965 was a preordained inevitability of the Cold War and domestic politics. In “Embers of War,” Logevall has conceived a prequel to his past work, examining two powerful, interdependent historical dramas. One is the French struggle to hold its colonial empire in Asia; the other is the progressive American entanglement in the war, first as a patron of the French and then as their successor in the effort to suppress the communist and nationalist Viet Minh insurgency.
(Random House) - ‘Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam’ by Fredrik Logevall
Like his previous work, “Embers of War” is a product of formidable international research. It is lucidly and comprehensively composed. And it leverages a consistently potent analytical perspective. Historical outcomes, Logevall demonstrates, are driven not only by global political and strategic forces but also by the passion, frailty and determination of individual leaders. As the author explains, his narrative is “full of alternative political choices, major and minor, considered and taken, reconsidered and altered, in Paris and Saigon, in Washington and Beijing, and in the Viet Minh’s headquarters in the jungles of Tonkin. It’s a reminder to us that to decision makers of the past, the future was merely a set of possibilities.”
In “Embers of War,” students of America’s Vietnam debacle will observe a truly striking foreshadowing of what followed in the Johnson years — the replication of French roles, the repetition of flawed assumptions and a predisposition by some to eschew dispassionate analysis in favor of emotional conviction. “Somehow, American leaders for a long time convinced themselves that the remarkable similarities between the French experience and their own were not really there,” Logevall writes. “It was, for the most part, self-delusion.”
France colonized Vietnam in 1884 and soon added Cambodia and Laos to a territory that became known as Indochina. Its colonial holdings, Logevall notes, were to be the beneficiary of France’s “mission civilisatrice,” or “civilizing mission.” The upheaval of World War I, however, helped foment different aspirations among some subjects of French dominion in Southeast Asia. In June 1919, a young, spindly Vietnamese using one of the 70 aliases he was to have in his life rented a morning coat and sought an audience in Paris with the American president, there to shape the postwar peace. The young man hoped to present to Woodrow Wilson a petition titled “The Demands of the Vietnamese People.” He was rebuffed. In time the petitioner became known as Ho Chi Minh, one of the most consequential revolutionary leaders of the 20th century and the father of Vietnamese nationalism, a man of phenomenal will who left his country at age 21 and did not return for 30 years.
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