A quarter century has passed since the end of the Vietnam War. With the opening of records not only in the United States but also in Vietnam, the former Soviet Union and China, along with the publication of testimony by participants, the image of the war has undergone major revisions. The United States, for example, with the trend toward conservatism in American politics since the 1980s, has seen the emergence of a “hawkish revisionism, ” largely driven by commanders who served in the war, politicians and commentators. These revisionist hawks argue that “America lost a winnable war, ” whether because civilian leaders tied the military's hands by insisting on fighting a “limited war” or because of “interference” by the mass media and antiwar demonstrators.
In response, liberals argued that the war was a tragic over-intervention arising from anticommunism and an illusion of omnipotence in an area where the United States had no compelling national interests. With radicals arguing, meanwhile, that American intervention in Vietnam was inevitable to secure Southeast Asian resources and markets and to liberalize global trade, heated debate over the war flared up again in the United States in 1985 on the 10
th anniversary of the collapse of the Saigon regime.
The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s led to progress in opening the Soviet diplomatic archives, while the adoption of open economic policies in China and Vietnam resulted in partial opening of archives in those countries. As a result, scholars can now research the Vietnam War not only from the American perspective but in a multi-dimensional way, taking into account the North Vietnamese, Chinese and Soviet perspectives as well.
This special issue reflects the expansion in perspectives on the war, with articles drawing not only on English-language sources but on Vietnamese-and Chinese-language sources as well, and analyzing trends in countries in the region such as Japan, Laos and Cambodia. This kind of multidimensional approach based on the mining of diverse sources is characteristic of today's scholarship, and is the reason we have titled this special issue “The Vietnam War as Contemporary History.”
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