The Vietnamese communist leadership displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and resourcefulness in its quest to drive out the Americans, finish off the regime in Saigon, and win the conflict by achieving national reunification under its exclusive aegis. At times, it proved callous to the extreme, making choices it understood might result in massive death and suffering for its people. Increasingly reliant over time upon military and other aid from socialist allies, most notably China and the Soviet Union, it still jealously guarded its autonomy, refusing even to consult those allies about major strategic matters. The audacity and temerity of the Hanoi Politburo were matched only by its impenetrability and staunchness. In the end, it prevailed over its enemies owing less to their shortcomings than to the merits of its masterfully crafted and carefully calibrated strategy of “struggle” on three separate yet closely intertwined fronts.

This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mill – the chapter traces several threads of skepticism toward natural rights. British writers, it argues, were preoccupied less with the unsound conceptual foundations of natural rights theories than with the perceived consequences of belief in natural rights, which was seen as leading in anarchic, destabilizing, and antinomian directions. Natural rights platforms, it was contended, appealed to passion, ignored context and the weighing of costs and benefits, and undermined both the rule of law and state authority. In addition, natural rights theories were perceived by critics to be connected to a range of worrying trends (democratization and the rise of socialism, among others). Natural rights theories, furthermore, stood in stark contrast to the utilitarian and historicist attitudes towards law and government which prevailed in Britain during these decades. Finally, the conclusion offers a glance at nineteenth-century France, contrasting the loyalty toward natural rights across the Channel with British hostility, and revealing that many of the fears that Britons articulated about the dissemination of natural rights ideas were harbored by the French with regard to the spread of consequentialism.

This chapter draws attention to the curious ways in which rights and liberty did – and did not – overlap in the context of eighteenth-century abolitionist movements. Many eighteenth-century anti-slavery activists initially focused on improving enslaved people’s condition through legal rights rather than granting them liberty. In Spanish and French empires, there were fairly elaborate legal codes restricting slaveholders from exercising especially cruel and arbitrary punishments or practices. The British Empire was in fact an outlier in its lack of any such restrictions. At the same time, slavery was increasingly regarded as unnatural and a violation of natural rights, a view that triumphed in Somerset v. Steuart (1772). Emancipation in the northern United States also granted some rights before liberty. Conversely, the Haitian Declaration of 1804 spoke of liberty, but not rights, and even liberty was a collective, rather than individual good.

Few issues from the Vietnam War divided the American public more than the character and nature of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The US government claimed that communist North Vietnam controlled the NLF, and that it wanted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam by force. Antiwar scholars and activists, in sharp contrast, argued that the NLF was born in the tinder-dry rice paddies of South Vietnam in response to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s oppressive policies. The NLF was very skillful at portraying itself as local freedom fighters, organized simply to free South Vietnam from foreign domination and a corrupt Saigon government. This made it difficult for successive US presidential administrations to win support at home and abroad for their counterinsurgency programs. In reality, the NLF was both Southern and communist. The Lao Dong, the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, was a nationwide, unified movement with revolutionaries placed in most villages and hamlets throughout Vietnam. The party leadership in Hanoi included several southerners, like Le Duan – the partys general secretary – who favored armed rebellion to liberate Vietnam south of the 17th parallel and to reunify the country under the socialist banner.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

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 fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War as well as the most dramatic turning point in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora. From the mid 1970s and the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Their lives were defined by concurrent and overlapping experiences of national loss, family separation, and difficulties among their loved ones in Vietnam amidst their own survival and adaptation in the new societies. They constructed their exilic identity through a host of media and built exilic communities through internal migration. Starting in the late 1980s, legal migration led tens of thousands of other Vietnamese to Little Saigon communities. In turn, they have enlarged the economic and political prowess of those communities, and helped to shift the collective experience from an exilic identity to a transnational identity.

This chapter introduces readers to the origins, conduct, and termination of the Third Indochina War. Marshaling old and new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Soviet, American, and ASEAN sources, as well as the most recent secondary literature, the chapter takes an international history perspective, focusing on the simultaneous decision-making of all sides directly or indirectly involved in the conflict. It adopts a chronological approach following the life-cycle of the conflict by first locating the origins of both wars from the inter-connected perspectives of the three main protagonists – Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Following that, the chapter describes the conduct of both wars and their eventual resolution. This involved, apart from the three main protagonists, the Soviet Union, the United States (and its allies). Although these countries were not directly involved in the fighting, they played a significant role in both prolonging the war and bringing about its end.

The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war’s end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos. After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migration changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended.

In the two decades after 1975, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. New resettlement programs arose not only in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and in the years immediately thereafter, but also in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, and 1996. These initiatives resulted from unilateral US policies, multilateral programs organized under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, bilateral programs negotiated between Washington and Hanoi, and, often, a combination of the three. This chapter explores how the Vietnamese diaspora influenced the American approach to normalization with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). It argues that normalization was a protracted process that unfolded over decades and that negotiating and implementing migration programs was a central part of the that process. The US approach to post-1975 US–SRV relations saw significant input from nonexecutive actors. Nonstate actors provided information and political pressure, and created close relationships with elected officials outside the White House, especially members of Congress. These groups, the actions of first-asylum nations, and other transnational forces combined to make negotiating and implementing migration programs a US priority. The contact, cooperation, and compromise that process required normalized US–Vietnamese relations, despite US assertions to the contrary.

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.

From a strategic standpoint, the final years of the American war in Vietnam highlighted a persistent uncertainty over how the conflict would end. Both civil and military leaders wrestled with confusing estimates on the war’s progress. These uncertainties mattered because they influenced the timing of and ways in which US forces withdrew from a war that would not end once the Americans had departed. Despite arguments that General Creighton Abrams had fought a “better war” in Vietnam leading to a military victory, a sense of strategic stalemate hung over these final years. Problems remained in assessing the political aspects of pacification, the staying power of the South Vietnamese armed forces once American troops departed, and the longterm viability of the Saigon regime. By early 1969, Abrams also had to confront political decisions leading to the first withdrawal of US troops, decisions that would pit him against the Nixon administration and bring to the surface grave civil–military tensions. Despite years of effort, a key question remained unanswered as these withdrawals began – how stable would South Vietnam be once Americans departed? Ultimately, these final years left the Americans no closer to answering the question of whether they would achieve “victory” in Vietnam.

This chapter offers a synthetic overview of the range of international law issues that arose during the course of the Vietnam War, especially as Americans took over from the French after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and moved towards massive escalation between 1964 and 1973. The chapter begins with the debate about what law applied to the conflict, which turned on the legal status of South Vietnam. The chapter then asks what claims were possible and plausible when it came to the legality of American intervention in the war. Next, the chapter addresses the different kinds of warfare in which the United States engaged, from its bombing campaigns over North Vietnamese territory and waters to the changing forms of its counterinsurgency in the South and, later, across the Cambodian border. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining the legal legacy of Vietnam: not only how it led to the most significant substantive development of the laws of war since the Geneva Conventions, the First and Second Additional Protocols, but also, and equally importantly, how it ensured that international law would play (for good or ill) a central role in debate over and analysis of all future conflicts.