Over the Hills and Far Away: Romania's Attempts to Mediate the Start of U.S.-North Vietnamese Negotiations, 1967–1968

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 64-96
Author(s):  
Mircea Munteanu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
San Antonio ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Tet Offensive

Building on earlier articles published in the Journal of Cold War Studies by James G. Hershberg and Zoltán Szoke, this article discusses Romania's involvement in the attempts to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the Vietnam War before and after the Tet Offensive. The literature concerning the Romanian channel (codenamed Packers) is negligible thus far. Part of the reason is that even though official U.S. documentation on Packers has been available for two decades, relevant Romanian documents were only recently declassified by the archive of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The new evidence from the Romanian archives completes the picture of what was, in effect, the last U.S. chance to begin negotiations over Vietnam without compromising the initial U.S. position. The conversations between Romanian Deputy Foreign Minister George Macovescu and Vietnamese Communist leaders on the eve of the Tet Offensive offer a much more detailed inside look at Hanoi's negotiating position in December 1967–January 1968. The Romanian documents also show the crystallization of the Vietnamese position of March 1968 with regard to opening talks and the San Antonio formula.

Hanoi's Diplomatic Front in Sweden: Communist Propaganda Strategies in the Vietnam War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Perry Johansson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Political Freedoms ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Global Cold War

This article offers a new perspective on the Swedish protests against the Vietnam War by placing it in its broader global Cold War context. As a case study on ‘people's diplomacy’ and ‘united front strategy’, it acknowledges the importance of Chinese and Vietnamese influences on the peace campaigns in Sweden and aims, as far as possible, to reconstruct Hanoi's motives, strategies and actions to create and direct Sweden's policy and opinion on the war. With the extremely generous political freedoms granted it by official Sweden, Hanoi was able to find new international allies as well as organise political propaganda manifestations from their Stockholm base. In the end, North Vietnam's version of the war as being about national liberation fought by a people united in their resistance to a foreign, genocidal, aggressor won a large enough share of the opinion in the West to force the American political leadership to give up the fight. Hanoi's Diplomatic Front in Sweden was one of the important battlefields behind that victory

The Anticommunist Việt-Cộng

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong Tran Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Resistance Movement

This chapter resurrects the infamous history of shadowy US-based anti-communist insurgent forces modelled on Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” Often disparaged as the quintessential “bad refugee” that brought the Vietnam War to America, as evidenced by the unsolved murders of several Vietnamese journalists suspected of communist ties, the members of the “resistance movement” were actually being “good refugees” as defined by the secret Cold War policies of the Reagan Administration.

10. The Vietnam War

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Tet Offensive

This chapter focuses on the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Lyndon B. Johnson inherited the Vietnam conflict in difficult circumstances. He had not been elected president in his own right and so, perhaps, believed that he should carry on with John F. Kennedy’s policies. It was unclear what exactly Kennedy would have done in Vietnam, but Johnson retained his predecessor’s foreign policy team and did not question the basic principle of America’s foreign policy, which called for communism to be resisted. The chapter first considers the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam during the period 1963–1965 before discussing the conflict between the US and North Vietnam in the succeeding years, along with the Tet offensive and its implications. It concludes with an assessment of Richard Nixon’s decision to restart large-scale US bombing of North Vietnam.

scholarly journals J. William Fulbright —- Belief Systems, Models of Representation and Re-Election Strategies, 1942-1962

1986 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
Kurt K. Tweraser
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Presidential Leadership ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
The Public ◽  
Systems Models ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Atlantic Community ◽  
Election Strategies

Most people remember Senator Fulbright as the great dissenter, the administration pariah, the vehement critic of the Vietnam war. There is more to the Fulbright puzzle than the distressed foreign affairs internationalists who turned to heresy. He was, before his conversion to an outspoken limitationism (Brown, 1985), a reflective man who shunned rather than sought the public spotlight, a party loyalist who preferred to exert influence from within, faithful supporter of NATO and the Atlantic Community, defender of foreign aid, even floor manager of the Tonkin Gulf resolution as a believer in the need for strong presidential leadership. Domestically, though, he was a middle-of-the-roader whose natural sympathies were for tradition and order, rather than for iconoclasm and rebellion.

Postwar Transformation and New Geopolitics

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-177
Author(s):  
Xiaobing Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Military Training ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Air Defense ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam

Chapter 7 explains Mao’s Cold War theory, in which a clash between China and the United States would inevitably occur sooner or later. The Chinese military should thus have its priorities and preparations established prior to this inevitable conflict. After the Indochina Settlement was signed at Geneva in July 1954, China continued to provide weaponry, equipment, and military training to North Vietnam. This chapter points out that, in June 1965, China began to send its troops to the Vietnam War. Between 1965 and 1968, China sent twenty-three divisions to Vietnam, including ninety-five regiments, totaling some 320,000 troops. Beginning in 1968, China also sent 110,000 troops to Laos to provide air defense, construct and repair highways, and maintain transportation and communication along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nevertheless, the Vietnam War seriously tested the limits of the Communist alliance. Rather than improving Sino-Soviet relations, aid to North Vietnam created a new competition as each superpower attempted to control Southeast Asian Communist movements.

The Roots and Rationalizations of U.S. Torture in Vietnam

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
William L. d'Ambruoso
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Behavioral Control ◽  
Sensory Deprivation ◽  
Control Techniques ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites ◽  
The U.S

This chapter traces the twin tales of the CIA’s and the U.S. military’s use of torture during the Vietnam War. The CIA’s interrogation program was rooted in the early days of the Cold War, when the agency was founded. U.S. foreign policy elites like Dwight Eisenhower and Allen Dulles were convinced that the Soviet Union’s freedom from norms and laws gave it an edge. As a result, the CIA began researching and practicing behavioral control techniques, using drugs and sensory deprivation to compete with Soviet programs. The agency’s KUBARK interrogation manual (1963) considered physical torture off-limits and ineffective, but recommended “maxim[izing] mental discomfort.” Likewise, CIA interrogators in Vietnam such as Frank Snepp believed isolation and sensory deprivation were both ethically and efficaciously superior to harsher alternatives. While racism and exasperation explain much of the U.S. military’s use of torture, soldiers also used water and electricity because the techniques were “unpleasant” but not “injurious.”

American Power and the New Mandarins Redux

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-83
Author(s):  
Kurt Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
American Power ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Tet Offensive

Noam Chomsky's landmark essay collection American Power and the New Mandarins was published about five decades ago, just after the Tet Offensive marked a turnaround in the Vietnam War. His superb debunking expedition, along with other early volumes At War In Asia and For Reasons of State, remains disturbingly relevant in its dissection of professional conceits, institutional deceits and booster attitudes in sectors of academe where everyone, says ‘we’ when referring to US foreign policy.

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