Vietnam: The Necessary War:; A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict
The Free Press, 1999. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. xix, [1], 314, [2] pages. Notes. Index. Michael Lind (born April 23, 1962) is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning with The Next American Nation (1995). He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Lind worked for the Heritage Foundation's State Department Assessment Project from 1988–90. After working as assistant to the director of the U.S. State Department's Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs from 1990–91, he was executive editor of The National Interest from 1991–94. He was an editor at Harper's Magazine from 1994–95, a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995–96, a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1996–97, and Washington Correspondent for Harper's Magazine from 1998–99. In 1999 he co-founded the New America Foundation (now New America) with Ted Halstead, Sherle Schwenninger, and Walter Russell Mead. At New America from 1999–2017 he was at various times Whitehead Senior Fellow, co-founder and co-director of the American Strategy Project, co-director of the Next Social Contract Initiative and an ASU Future of War Fellow. Since 2017, he has been a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught courses on American democracy, American political economy and American foreign policy at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Virginia Tech's Arlington campus. Reexamining the war in Vietnam as an important conflict, or "proxy war, " in the larger context of the Cold War, Michael Lind asserts that much was at stake and much was lost in an unfortunate military defeat. He criticizes the terms of the debate that has taken place since the end of the war, especially the disappearance of the "Cold War liberal" position.
What went wrong in Vietnam? Michael Lind casts new light on one of the most contentious episodes in American history in this controversial bestseller. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of America's most disastrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context -- as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provocative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war.
In an era when the United States often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Iraq, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Americans of all political viewpoints.
Derived from a Kirkus review: A single-minded interpretation of the Vietnam War based on the author’s conviction that the conflict’s overriding issue was a Moscow-directed international communist conspiracy. Cold warrior Lind, resembling an intellectual Rambo, verbally machine-guns Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese communists, along with Americans who had any sympathies with them—everyone, in short, who disagrees with his proposition that the Vietnam War boiled down to a contest of American-led Western good versus communist evil. One purpose of this impassioned book is “to set the historical record straight,” Lind says. Some sections, such as an examination of regional and ethnic influences in the antiwar movement, are well researched, backed up with solid sources, and convincingly argued. Lind convincingly undermines the “stab in the back” theory that holds that the US military could have defeated the North Vietnamese if politicians hadn’t tied the military’s hands. Lind also correctly pegs Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War policymaking as “a resounding failure in every way.” The author presents many complex issues as food for thought. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Cold War, Insurgency, National Liberation, Guerrilla War, Antiwar Movement, Balance of Power, Flexible Response, David Brinkley, Herbert Chandler, Robert Dallek, Edward Jay Epstein, Frances Fitzgerald, William Fulbright, David Halberstam, Tom Hayden
ISBN: 9780684842547
[Book #79955]
Price: $45.00