Michael E. Latham

Redirecting the revolution? The USA and the failure of nation-building in South Vietnam

Abstract This article will examine the ideology and practice of the USAs nation-building campaign in South Vietnam in the 1960s. Specifically, it will analyse the way in which US officials and social scientists conceived of development and promoted it as a weapon for anti-communist counter-insurgency. Convinced that they could modernise South Vietnam in ways that would undercut the sources of the revolution and create a liberal, capitalist state, they embarked on a comprehensive programme of social engineering with disastrous results. The article will also reflect on the reasons why, despite growing evidence of policy failure, US officials continued to promote a strategy that ignored Vietnamese history. In closing, it will reflect on the degree to which US assumptions about the basic malleability of the Vietnamese and their institutions have found echoes in the recent US attempts to reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975

In 1958, only one year after his country gained independence from Britain, the Ghanaian prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, delivered a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In addition to a resolute anti-imperialism, he emphasized that two related imperatives would play a crucial role in shaping the orientation of Africa toward the wider world. First, the tremendous “industrial and military power concentrated behind the two great powers in the Cold War” demanded that the new states of Africa pursue a policy of non-alignment. In Africa, Nkrumah insisted, “the opportunities of health and education and a wider vision which other nations take for granted are barely within reach of our people.” To preserve their impoverished continent from devastating violence, African nations would have to remain apart from the Cold War’s military alliances, rivalries, and strife. Second, Africa would have to seek dramatically accelerated development. Colonial overlords had failed to deliver promised advances, but “now comes our response. We cannot tell our peoples that material benefits and growth and modern progress are not for them. If we do, they will throw us out and seek other leaders who promise more. And they will abandon us, too, if we do not in reasonable measure respond to their hopes. We have modernize.”

Heonik Kwan, The Other Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 232 pp.

This is a challenging, insightful, and provocative book. Since the 1970s, the insights of anthropology and ethnography have radically altered the discipline of history, leading scholars to emphasize the lived experience of diverse populations and to think about large-scale political and economic transformations in new and far more productive ways. The field of diplomatic history and the study of the Cold War, by contrast, have remained largely untouched by that phenomenon. Focused on large-scale questions of state-to-state relations, geopolitics, and international economics, realists and their opposing revisionist counterparts paid little attention to questions of how local communities interpreted and lived through the Cold War’s complex effects. Starting in the 1990s, a younger generation of scholars raised important questions about the Cold War’s intellectual and cultural history, widening the field of vision. As Kwon convincingly argues, however, scholars have largely ignored the social history of the Cold War, and in doing so have failed to explore the truly global dimensions of a conflict that even now continues to transform millions of lives. Much of the problem, Kwon observes, has to do with the tendency to foreshorten our understanding of the Cold War both spatially and temporally. Following the criticisms made by scholars like Walter LaFeber and Bruce Cumings, Kwon notes that John Lewis Gaddis’s influential conception of the Cold War as a “long peace” largely ignores the parts of the world in which much of the most visceral, unrelenting violence of the Cold War took place—the Third World. It is not the “periphery,” after all, if you happen to live there. More originally, Kwon also raises the surprising extent to which morally charged arguments about the origins of the Cold War rage without ceasing, while the end of the Cold War is treated as a closed question. Rather than accepting 1989 as an obvious kind of terminal point, demarcating the start of a decidedly “post–Cold War era,” Kwon instead puts forward “the decomposition of the Cold War” (p. 8), a corporeal metaphor suggesting a slow, lingering, ongoing process in which contests over meaning and memory persist well into the present. Studies of the way that conceptions of race and ideology were intertwined, he argues, provide a particularly promising line of inquiry. Just as racial segregation was often