In 1968–73, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China played crucial military and political roles in the Vietnam War, particularly against the background of larger developments in world politics. The Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement, and Soviet-American détente all influenced the North Vietnamese conduct of war. The split made coordination of socialist aid in the second half of the 1960s difficult, but also resulted in a Sino-Soviet competition of aid that enabled North Vietnam to launch the Tet Offensive in early 1968 in the first place. Rapprochement convinced the DRV to launch the Easter Offensive – a second Tet Offensive – in the spring of 1972. Détente eventually forced North Vietnam to rethink its strategy of trying to win a victory against the United States on the battlefield in Indochina and humiliate the superpower at the global level in the process. Despite Moscow and Beijing’s sustained loyalty throughout the conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neither supported Hanoi’s overall strategy during the last years of the war. The Soviet Union preferred a negotiated solution to the conflict, while China jettisoned its world revolutionary positions in the 1970–72 period and instead counselled North Vietnam to settle for a negotiated agreement.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The 1973–75 period has received scant attention from western scholars. For most, the war ended when the Americans left, but the seeds of the destruction of South Vietnam were sown with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973. Although both Vietnamese antagonists had suffered tremendous physical damage during the 1972 offensive, their irreconcilable political visions prevented them from creating peace. Hanoi had refused to remove its troops from the country after the offensive, and, despite a signed agreement, it had promptly broken the accords, determined to conquer Saigon and unite the country under its flag. Thus, there are four main reasons for the defeat of South Vietnam: North Vietnamese abrogation of the Paris Peace Accords, dire South Vietnamese economic conditions, the reduction of US aid and its debilitating effect on the South Vietnamese military, and President Nguyen Van Thieu’s strategic military blunders. The first three forced Thieu into an impossible predicament, which led to the fourth. The outcome was the fall of South Vietnam.

This chapter summarizes some of the key issues confronting Vietnam after the so-called “liberation of the South” in 1975. Partly because of the fact that it was a military takeover, the new regime was immediately confronted with new economic, political, and diplomatic pressures from the United States, China, and a host of other countries. In addition, the new leadership plunged Vietnam into more than a decade of difficulties on all fronts – including protracted wars with China and Cambodia – because of over-confidence, ideological steadfastness, and miscalculations. Domestic resistance and international pressures of various kinds finally brought about grudging changes that culminated in the reform process of the late 1980s, which thereby helped to open up a new horizon for Vietnam and its people.

This chapter argues that the 1848 Revolutions can profitably be understood through the prism of arguments over rights. It highlights a series of contests between those who championed a “thin” conception of individual civil and political rights and those who defended a variety of “thicker” understandings: whether of rights as belonging to collectives, especially national minorities; as protecting cultural, linguistic, or gender identities and differences; or as demands for extensive state action to challenge economic domination of workers by landowners and capitalists. The offer of individual rights under a “thinner” constitutional order in the Habsburg monarchy was insufficient to address conflicts between the dominant Magyar nation and the claims of the regime’s other national groups; at the same time, these conflicts generated nuanced efforts to theorize individual and collective rights by figures such as József Eötvös. Ostensibly “thin” demands for individual equality under the law proved unable to protect individuals – particularly emancipated slaves, peasants, laborers, and women – from domination deep-seated in existing social structures.

In the 1980s and beyond, a variety of ways of thinking about the Vietnam War began to coalesce into conventional recollections: the received knowledge and common sense of the war. A truism was that Vietnam veterans had suffered a difficult homecoming worsened by their sense that they alone bore the war’s moral burdens. Aware of that predicament through the emerging understanding of post-traumatic stress, their fellow Americans felt obliged to offer Vietnam veterans the comfort of recognition. To overcome veterans’ isolation and bring together a divided public, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial acknowledged the service and sacrifices of those who had fought. Vietnam veterans became the principal vectors who overcame Cold War–generated divisions about the war, and brought it into public understanding through their testimony in oral histories and documentaries, literary works, and complaints about their grievances. Although opinion polls indicated throughout the decades that most Americans believed that their nation acted wrongly in Vietnam, a generational shift is now occurring as new cohorts grow up separated from the experience of the war by the span of years. As memories fall away through time, the Vietnam War becomes an artifact of American culture, of which everyone becomes the collective custodian and repository.

Until 1954 the strategically important Central Highlands were primarily inhabited by some twenty indigenous ethnic groups that the French and Americans collectively referred to as Montagnards or Highlanders. From 1960 the communist National Liberation Front sought to recruit Highlanders, leading to a rapid deterioration of the security situation in the Central Highlands, which in 1961 provoked the deployment of US Special Forces to lead Highlander militias. In combination with discriminatory policies of successive South Vietnamese governments, the militarization of the Highlands spurred the emergence in 1964 of a Highlands autonomy movement known as FULRO. As the Central Highlands became one of the main theaters of war, an attack by communist forces on an American airstrip close to Pleiku in the Central Highlands prompted the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder and the landing of US combat troops near Da Nang in 1965. After a decade of forced resettlement and displacement of Highlanders, it was the silent complicity of FULRO militia and indigenous populations around the Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot that ensured the element of surprise in the attack by regular North Vietnamese cavalry in March 1975, triggering the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam one month later.

This chapter gives an overview of the destruction and transformation of South Vietnam during the war, and especially of the ramifications of the American military presence and its firepower, as well as of the American economic aid that kept the homefront afloat. In the rural areas, the American presence depopulated the countryside and compelled peasants to flee in a “forced draft urbanization and modernization” wave. In the urban areas, it initiated an economic boom, creating a more prosperous middle class, and a more robust entrepreneurial sector dominated by overseas Chinese allied with the military. Overnight, it also created a large service sector that rose to cater to the needs of its military personnel, and the economic rise of this group of formerly underclass people inflicted stress on South Vietnam’s traditional society. This society – and its culture – was further transformed and strained by the introduction of American consumer goods and lifestyle. The American presence also changed the political map, handing the South Vietnamese military unparalleled political power which a fractious political body could not challenge. As the American presence drew to a close, this entire social, military, political, and economic edifice began to crack and eventually collapsed in 1975.

This chapter analyzes what New York Times correspondent David Halberstam called “a war within a war,” the conflict between journalists who reported about the deficiencies of the Saigon government or the US war effort in Vietnam and administration officials in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations who considered those stories myopic or malicious. It argues that news media coverage of the Vietnam War rankled presidents not because it was slanted or sensational but because it showed the hard realities, high costs, and inconvenient truths of a controversial war. As polls revealed declining popular support for the US war effort, it became politically expedient for Johnson and Nixon to blame the news media – and especially the television networks – for public discontent. The “war within the war” has had enduring legacies. The efforts of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to discredit the reporting of television journalists, prominent columnists, and newspaper correspondents established precedents that a later generation of government officials has used in 21st-century battles over “fake news.” Like so much of the US experience in Vietnam, the disputes over the reporting of the war remain part of the present, even as they recede further into the past.

The 1968 Tet Offensive proved to be the turning point of the Vietnam War, and its effects were far-reaching. In late January, the combined forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces launched a massive offensive in South Vietnam, striking near simultaneously at 5 of 6 autonomous cities, 36 of 44 province capitals, 72 of 245 district towns, and 23 airfields/bases. Despite intelligence indicators that predicted a major enemy buildup, the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were taken by surprise at the scope and ferocity of the communist attacks. The allies recovered quickly; in the bitter fighting that followed into the early fall months, the communists were soundly defeated at the tactical level and failed to achieve any of their battlefield objectives. However, the fact that the enemy had pulled off such a widespread offensive and caught the allies by surprise ultimately contributed to a psychological victory for the communists at the strategic level. The Tet Offensive set into motion the events that would lead to the election of Richard Nixon, the long and bloody US withdrawal from Southeast Asia, and ultimately the fall of South Vietnam.

By recovering fragments of the political negotiations that took place between native peoples and European colonizing powers in the settler colonies of Canada and Australia, this chapter argues that treaty-making was central to the ability of Indigenous peoples to assert the rights they wanted, rather than those they were granted, against imperial and colonial states. In settler colonies, colonial states used the principles of protection and assimilation to establish the legal status of Indigenous peoples to create them as subjects within a particular legal order that set the place of everyone in relation to the sovereign. Without a treaty, Indigenous peoples were effectively placed in a position where they could only claim rights that were compatible with the aims of protection in the nineteenth century, and so were defined by the colonial authorities. Yet the language of ‘rights’ could restrict, or even distort, some of the political arguments that Indigenous peoples wanted to assert, for example in relation to hunting and fishing rights that Europeans understood in terms of access to resources in order to secure their subsistence.

From the 1950s through 1975, American women served in the Vietnam War through the US armed services, the American Red Cross, and US government agencies. Deficiencies in record-keeping have made it difficult to know exactly how many American women deployed to Vietnam, but estimates suggest that about 8,000 to 10,000 women served military tours, while 25,000 or more went to Vietnam in civilian capacities. Although a few women went to Vietnam before the United States committed combat troops and remained in country until 1975, the majority of American women who served in either military or civilian capacities arrived between 1965, the year of the first deployment of ground troops, and 1973, when the last US combat troops departed. Women were not assigned to infantry or other forward units, but they experienced the trauma of war through their work with US servicemen. In particular, nurses and Red Cross workers saw what combat did to soldiers, yet the nature of their jobs and the expectation that they nurture wounded and traumatized servicemen required them to put aside their own mental and emotional injuries that the war inflicted.

Noting the proliferation of human rights leagues at the turn of the twentieth century, and their significance up to the interwar period, this chapter argues that such leagues built on an organizational and discursive repertoire built over the course of the prior century by three transnational movements above all: the abolitionist, women’s suffrage, and peace movements. These movements shared a recognition of a systemic link between the rule of law, humanitarianism, and political participation by the people, and they sought to realize these connected values through new forms of association and mobilization. These movements shared some personnel, organizing strategies, and rhetoric. Although the language of rights and more particularly “human rights” or “droits de l’homme” was relatively marginal to these movements, especially outside France, their members did invoke human rights both to make their case on behalf of each of these humanitarian aims and also to draw connections between them, particularly between the abolition of slavery and women’s emancipation. Peace societies offered another model for bringing together diverse social groups around common political and humanitarian goals. Members of the French Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, founded in 1898 in the context of the Dreyfus affair, as well as its provincial affiliates and human rights leagues it inspired in other countries, drew not only or even primarily on the legacy of the few prior organizations dedicated specifically to rights, but more generally on the example of these three humanitarian social movements.