Vietnamese Adoptions in the Early War Years

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Varzally
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
International Obligations ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Familial Relations ◽  
At Home

This chapter explores the first wave of Vietnamese adoptions against a backdrop of military escalation and growing anti-war sentiment. It examines the language of responsibility, culpability and multiculturalism that came to dominate defences of adoptions in the Vietnam War era as Americans reconsidered the effectiveness and morality of U.S. foreign policy. Integral to such rhetoric was the imagined and real participation of American men and women as soldiers and social workers in Vietnam. The chapter not only elaborates the ways in which Vietnamese adoptions offered Americans an opportunity to engage with gendered notions of citizenship, but also addresses questions about chances for racial equality at home, the extent of the nation’s international obligations, and the power of intimate, familial relations to alter society.

‘Experience is the only teacher’: Academic ambassadors interpret ‘mutual understanding’

2019 ◽  
pp. 130-148
Author(s):  
Alice Garner ◽  
Diane Kirkby
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
National Government ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Educational Exchange ◽  
Political Interference ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Academic Ambassadors

The Vietnam War posed significant challenges to academics on educational exchange who were expected under the Fulbright program to be ambassadors as well as researchers. The CIA surveillance of the anti-war movement and political interference in the administration of the Fulbright program from government caused academics in both Australia and America to defend the autonomy of the Program. How did scholars interpret the ambassadorial expectation when they were opposed to their government’s foreign policy? Many also found they could not speak critically of their national government without antagonising their hosts. Living up to the Fulbright program’s ideal of achieving ‘mutual understanding’ was very much a matter of learning by experience, to be interpreted by scholars for whom research was actually the priority.

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.

Transnational Relations as a Threat to the Democratic Process

1971 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 706-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
Transnational Relations ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
Democratic Control ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Industrial Societies

Transnational relations and other multional process seriously threaten democratic control of foreign policy, particularly in advanced industrial societies. The intermeshing of decisionmaking across national frontiers and the growing multinationalization of formerly domestic issues are inherently incompatible with the traditional framework of democratic control. The threat is all the more serious because it is sustained not by enemies of democracy but unknowingly by people who consider themselves to be acting within Western democratic traditions and because it results in part from the very forces of internationalism, interdependence, and economic advancement that have come to be regarded as indispensable. The consequences of these developments and the ongoing erosion of control over military and foreign policy, dramatically demonstrated by the debate on the Vietnam War, amount to a fundamental challenge to the democratic structure of Western societies. This essay analyzes the threat of transnational relations by reexamining the arguments for limited democratic control of foreign policy in light of recent structural changes in world politics and the consequences of transnational relations for the democratic process and its institutions. It concludes by indicating some approaches that could strengthen the democratic dimension which is being eroded.

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.”

Paul Wolfowitz and the promise of American power, 1969–2001

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Milne
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
American Power ◽  
Bush Doctrine ◽  
Political Evolution ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Moment

The study of foreign policy and international relations often takes ideas as rigid and fully formed, being assigned to individuals and categories of school without much attention to the processes by which they change calibre and gain or lose traction. David Milne’s politico-intellectual biography of Paul Wolfowitz from 1969 until he took up service in the administration of George W. Bush focuses precisely on the vagaries as well as the consistencies in the evolution of his thought. Many of the shifts and deepening convictions derived, of course, form the experience of observing and implementing US policy in the latter stages of the Vietnam War and thereafter. Milne takes us through the phases of Wolfowitz’s political evolution up to the moment of 9/11, showing that the “War on Terror” cannot simply be attributed to the trauma of that event; there were many existing tributaries that played into the Bush doctrine, and these have not always been given the recognition they deserve.

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.

Vietnam War and India, 1965–6

2019 ◽  
pp. 222-265
Author(s):  
Zorawar Daulet Singh
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Asian Crisis ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Role Conception ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Policy Shifts ◽  
Significant Flux

Even though the escalation of the Vietnam war was the most significant Asian crisis of the 1960s, we rarely ever think about Indian diplomacy during this conflict. But what makes the second Indochina crisis of 1965–6 particularly interesting is that the post-Nehruvian foreign policy shifts vividly reflected in the contestations and debates on India’s posture and strategy towards the Vietnam war. Hence, we will be able to evaluate Indira Gandhi’s foreign policy in the extended neighbourhood very early in her tenure when domestic rivals contested her leadership and authority at a time of significant flux in Indian politics. In many ways, this phase marks the final displacement of Nehru’s peacemaker role conception with an alternative security seeker role.

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